


Unlikely Friends

by Skullharvester



Series: One-Shots (Ratchet & Clank) [4]
Category: Ratchet & Clank
Genre: Alternate Universe, Drophyd, Robot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-05
Updated: 2020-10-05
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:47:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26831656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skullharvester/pseuds/Skullharvester
Summary: Victor Von Ion isn't sure of what to think of his new partner, but Drek's the one calling the shots.
Series: One-Shots (Ratchet & Clank) [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2120196
Comments: 2
Kudos: 2





	Unlikely Friends

**Author's Note:**

> Enjoy and have fun! 
> 
> If you liked this tale, please drop me a kudos and/or a comment to let me know if you'd like to see more! 
> 
> Thank you, and have a wonderful night!

* * *

“Really, boss? You’re gonna start writin’ paychecks to a _fish_?” Victor mumbled to the short blarg at his side.

Drek laughed and said, “Come now, Victor. You know there are people out there who would disagree with the notion of paying a robot for their services, so you of all people ought to be a little more open-minded. Besides, I think you two will get along swell. Like two peas in a pod.”

“Yeah, whatever, don’t blow hot air up my exhaust pipes, alright? If you say she’s with us, then she’s with us. I get it.” The hulking warbot stormed off, trudging through the sand miserably. He hated sand. It got everywhere in all the tiny crevices of his chassis, but worst of all, on beaches like this, it was sometimes moist from the neighboring body of water. 

Water made him nervous since he wasn’t resistant to the stuff, unlike more modern robots, so of course he wasn’t too fond about the idea of having a teammate that required lots of it.

He stopped to more closely examine the mechanical suit that his new partner lived in, he supposed. She was a Drophyd – a little round sentient fish creature from the planet Zaurik, and the suit had a big orange dome where a head would be on a robot that served as a fishbowl of sorts. Currently, she wasn’t inside of it, and that only made the suit look creepier and more lifeless to Victor. 

The suit just sat beside the ocean, slumped over as if it were a forlorn person waiting for someone’s return. In a way, it was. It had no actual life of its own, but Victor saw the way it moved when it was inhabited. Some real uncanny valley stuff there, except in this case, it was a non-sentient machine that almost imitated a sentient one. The arms were so long that they touched the ground even while standing upright, and skinny legs like a bird or a toad with its legs stretched out.

He poked the glass dome, and it fell over, clanking against some seashells that had washed up onto the beach.

“Hey! Don’t mess with that! You’ll break it, ya dummy!” The Drophyd’s bulging eyes could have fooled Victor into thinking they were a couple of small beach balls or round buoys floating along the ocean’s surface, if he didn’t hear talking coming from underneath them.

“It looks like a beached sea creature. Maybe I should just roll it back into the water where it belongs,” the warbot suggested, planting his foot against the fallen suit, which apparently accepted its fate in the way that it just laid against the hot sand helplessly with its odd arms strewn out.

The Drophyd emerged more of its body towards the top of the water. “The suit’s amphibious.”

Victor tightened his jaw ponderously. He had no idea what that word meant, and the Drophyd could tell.

“That means it can walk on land _and_ swim in water.” She swam in a figure eight pattern without taking her bulbous eyes off him, like a shark sizing up its prey. “Can _you_?” With a final twirl, she sent a splash of water in his direction. 

He took a step back, gasping audibly when a few of the droplets splattered across the foot that had previously pinned down the Drophyd’s suit. Her amused grin was just barely visible above the waterline.

He pointed at her threateningly. “Do that again, and I’ll turn you into sushi.” To show that he wasn’t playing around, he brought out one of the Razor Claws hidden in the back of his wrist.

“Nice,” was her enthusiastic response to seeing the weapon as she bounced out of the water and across the sand until she was in front of her suit. Slapping at a button on the chest, the water in the dome drained into the chest cavity of the suit before the dome popped open, allowing her to squirm inside. 

When she smacked another button on the inside with a fin, the water returned to the top part where she resided, along with the vivid orange color to her face now that she could breathe again, and the suit sprang to its feet.

Her suit lumbered right up to Victor, until their chest plates bumped together clumsily. Since the suit wasn’t a part of her real body, the Drophyd clearly had no sense of personal space while she was in the thing. To her, it was just a vehicle for moving around in, but Victor couldn’t convince himself to see it as anything but a mutilated robot, with the Drophyd as its parasitic host.

“I’d show you my weapon collection if they didn’t all get confiscated by the prison guards,” she said. “I’m surprised my suit didn’t get sold off, but I guess they just couldn’t find a buyer before your boss showed up to bail me out. That was pretty nice of him, by the way. Hardly anyone gives Drophyds the time of day. Even other Drophyds.”

Victor retracted his blade, then re-positioned her suit to at least create a foot of space between them. “It wasn’t my call,” he mentioned with a glower.

She was totally unfazed, neither by him moving her nor his remark. Her suit just wobbled around on its bowed legs until she was facing further down the shore, where crustacean creatures scuttled around in the distance, oblivious to the world. The crustaceans were pretty oblivious, too.

Victor watched her stare longingly into the distance, only able to wonder what was going through the talking fish’s tiny mind. He got a little jumpy when her suit spun back around on one leg, nearly toppling over in doing so. The suit’s mechanical arms stretched out towards him, their pincer-like appendages clicking anxiously. He waited for whatever it was that she was about to do, expecting the worst.

Finally, she asked, “Do you like _guns_?”

“Uh… Yeah?” The way she smiled at his answer made him even more nervous.

“Do you have one on you? Like right now?”

He nodded.

His mechanical heart seized up when the Drophyd’s suit started bouncing up and down excitedly, clapping its pincers together when she also celebrated his reply by dancing around in her tank. That thing – the suit – was too animated for his liking. Where did the Drophyd even _get_ those?

“Let’s go shoot things,” she insisted, and without awaiting his approval, one of her suit’s pincers snapped forward, grabbed him by the wrist, and dragged him down the beach, going towards where the critters were at.

“Hey, hold on! Wh –”

“Bang! Bang! Kill! Kill! Heheheheh!”

Actually, now that Victor was thinking about it, the fish was kind of cool. Out of her mind, but Drek might have been onto something about them having a few things in common.

“What did you say your name was again, fish?”

“Lieutenant Finneas, but my friends just call me Finn! You?”

“Victor Von Ion, but call me Vic! I ain’t got no friends, but if I did, they’d probably call me Vic.”

“Okay, Vic! Let’s shoot some stuff!”

“Sounds good, Finn! Just don’t land me in prison!”

“No promises!”


End file.
